• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Bitcoin & Other Cryptocurrencies

If you wanted some, buy now.

Or just get into mining Dogecoin like everyone else has.
 
The person who invented bit coin is a genius, he essentially got the world to believe that a mathematical algorithm that they invented had some kind of value when it was based upon nothing more than an idea.

They have made the legend of Aladins lamp a reality and gotten very rich out of the process. My next business idea is to convinced Moonbeams can be securely traded for goods and services... I shall call it... Beamacoiny!
 
AnacondaEq said:
The person who invented bit coin is a genius, he essentially got the world to believe that a mathematical algorithm that they invented had some kind of value when it was based upon nothing more than an idea.

They have made the legend of Aladins lamp a reality and gotten very rich out of the process. My next business idea is to convinced Moonbeams can be securely traded for goods and services... I shall call it... Beamacoiny!
"Satoshi Nakamoto" invented bitcoin. Satoshi is widely believed to be a pseudonym and Satoshi's true identity is unknown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto. The account that mined block 1 is presumably Satoshi, but while that account holds an awful lot of coins, but the blockchain shows this account has never spent any.
 
Retailers look to Bitcoin as currency for life's basics
By Zoe Kleinman, Technology reporter, BBC News

In the seaside town of Swanage, "cash only" signs still pepper the high street shops and cafes.
Bank transaction charges and problems with phone lines have led some to reluctantly abandon accepting any other form of payment, even during the lucrative summer holidays.

But one local business has decided to embrace a controversial alternative.
Nestled beside the small ads noticeboard in the crowded shop window of Swanage News is a small sticker that reads "Bitcoin accepted here".
The so far unregulated digital currency has courted controversy because of its volatile value and its popularity among cybercriminals.
With that track record, can it ever become an everyday essential?

Newsagent owner Andy James hopes so. He decided to look into accepting payments in Bitcoin last month after hearing about it on a TV show.
He is hoping his service will be a hit with the many tourists who flock to this part of the Jurassic Coast, in southern England, at this time of year but so far his only two Bitcoin customers have both been local.

"The first transaction we ever did was for a Kit Kat for 65p," he said.
"The gentleman put it down on the counter and asked to pay by Bitcoin, It was really busy in the shop at the time and we thought he was joking, but he wasn't. It was very exciting."
8)

Perhaps appropriately, given the currency's capricious exchange rate, Mr James's other customer spent his Bitcoin on lottery tickets.
"We were hoping they would be winners... but we don't think they were," he says ruefully.

There are many apps and software solutions available for retailers who want to take Bitcoin.
Mr James chose an app that, like many others, converts the price from sterling into Bitcoin and then generates a QR code for the customer to scan with their smartphone.
This completes the transaction from their digital wallet into his.

The Coin of Sale app was created by Tomas Forgac in Singapore.
Mr Fogac's European clients include sandwich chain Subway's outlets across the Czech Republic.
He says he uses Bitcoin for most of his business expenses.
"The keyboard I'm typing this answer on and memory I added to the laptop this week have been bought with Bitcoin," he emailed.
"I pay my utilities and phone bill, air-con cleaning with Bitcoin and all company expenses are in Bitcoin (server hosting, printing etc)."

But in the UK it seems Bitcoin users are more interested in spending their virtual currency on having a good time.
"So far [our] largest transaction was a £900 bill in a bar," Mr Fogac said.

Pub chain Individual Pubs has also found that drinkers are happy to open up their digital wallets.
The company has had a good response since it started accepting Bitcoin payments in June last year, taking £750 in the first two weeks.
Director Stephen Early says he has been surprised by the level of interest, and the chain now averages around £1,000 a month in Bitcoin transactions across its five establishments in Norwich, Cambridge and Hackney, London.

"It's only a small part of the business," he wrote on the company website.
"It's obviously still enthusiasts who have heard about it on the net."

Turnover may be comparatively small but even large brands such as razorblade giant King of Shaves say it feels significant.
Chief executive and founder Will King says the company, which has a multimillion-pound turnover, has processed 15 orders totalling around $1,000 (£599) since it started accepting Bitcoin last month.
"I think it's huge," he told the BBC. "People are as dismissive of Bitcoin now as they were of Twitter in 2007.
"People need to stop thinking of it as a bet. It's an elegant piece of friction-free currency that doesn't wear away like a £5 note does."

If there is a financial revolution taking place, Swanage News may be a bit ahead of its time locally - holidaymakers were out in force in the town but hardly any of the ones I spoke to had even heard of Bitcoin, let alone invested in it.

Mr James remains optimistic.
"It's worth doing. Obviously it's a new thing at the moment and people have to get used to it," he said.
"We've had loads of interest. A few people have asked how they can get hold of Bitcoins for the future, to come in next time they're down."

For now he is relying on traditional sales techniques to drum up trade.
"We're offering a discount on certain products for people if they pay by Bitcoin," he added.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28802887
 
Nearly 18 months after the Silk Road online drug market was busted by law enforcement, the criminal charges rippling out from the case have now come full circle: back to two of the law enforcement agents involved in the investigation, one of whom is accused of being the Silk Road’s mole inside the Drug Enforcement Agency.

DEA special agent Carl Force and Secret Service special agent Shaun Bridges were arrested Monday and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. Bridges is accused of placing $800,000 of Silk Road bitcoins he obtained in a personal account on the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange. But Bridges’ charges pale in comparison with the accusations against the DEA’s Force, who is additionally charged with theft of government property and conflict of interest in his investigation of the Silk Road. Force allegedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin payments from the Silk Road as part of his undercover investigation and placing them in a personal account rather than confiscating them as government property. He’s also accused of secretly working for the bitcoin exchange firm CoinMKT, using his DEA powers to seize a customer’s funds there, and later using a subpoena to the payment firm Venmo to try to unlock his frozen funds there.

But there’s an even more surprising set of accusations against Force: That he acted as a paid informant for Silk Road’s recently convicted administrator Ross Ulbricht, allegedly selling information about the investigation back to Ulbricht under two different pseudonyms. Meanwhile, under a third pseudonym, Force is separately accused of trying to blackmail Ulbricht using other law enforcement data he believed might have been Ulbricht’s identity. ...

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-mole-silk-road/
 
Other people will be there, digging away...
 
Reposting this here - I didn't know there was a bitcoin thread.

Here's an interesting & slightly astonishing Bitcoin fact:


Bitcoin mining this year has consumed more electricity than 159 countries worldwide. More than Ireland & several other European countries, and more than most of Africa. Individual countries, not added together.

With the price of a single Bitcoin around $10,000 it seems it's currently being used as an 'investment vehicle' more than an alternative means of payment. Echoes of the Dutch tulip bulb bubble from early 1600s with added environmental impact..

The new research used data provided by Digiconomist, whose current estimate of electricity used to mine bitcoin is around 30.14 TWh annually. That’s way above Ireland’s 25 TWh yearly average electricity consumption. In fact, according to a recent paper from Dutch bank ING, a single bitcoin transaction consumes enough energy to power the average household for an entire month. Digiconomist also found that Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency today, also uses more than a country’s worth of electricity.

In the case of Bitcoin, currently the most popular cryptocurrency, the multitude of miners now make it necessary to use either gaming graphics cards or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), both of which consume considerable amounts of energy.

The exorbitant amounts of energy needed to mine cryptocurrency make it an environmental hazard, as much of the world’s electricity still comes from greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels. This means that cryptocurrency mining is contributing to global climate change. Furthermore, the high energy requirements for cryptocurrencies are also a stumbling block for mass adoption.

Interestingly, a paper published in 2014 by researchers from the Hamilton Institute at the National University of Ireland Maynooth considered the impact cryptocurrency mining has on electricity. The authors, Karl J. O’Dwyer and David Malone, concluded that “the cost of Bitcoin mining on commodity hardware now exceeds the value of the reward.”
 
Reposting this here - I didn't know there was a bitcoin thread.

Here's an interesting & slightly astonishing Bitcoin fact:


Bitcoin mining this year has consumed more electricity than 159 countries worldwide. More than Ireland & several other European countries, and more than most of Africa. Individual countries, not added together.

With the price of a single Bitcoin around $10,000 it seems it's currently being used as an 'investment vehicle' more than an alternative means of payment. Echoes of the Dutch tulip bulb bubble from early 1600s with added environmental impact..
...And that is probably the thing that makes it unsustainable. It's a huge waste of energy.
 
Say I've got 100 bitcoins (I haven't), can I exchange them easily for hard cash ? .. UK or US ?.
 
Say I've got 100 bitcoins (I haven't), can I exchange them easily for hard cash ? .. UK or US ?.
You can, but how you go about selling them is apparently difficult (so I've heard).
 
I have no idea.
There are websites where you can sell them, but how much you pay...dunno...
Steam (the games platform) stopped taking payment via bitcoin today. One reason they cited was the transaction fee which is currently around $20 to confirm a transaction. When you're buying $5 games, a $20 fee to accept $5 makes that a losing proposition.
 
I have long maintained that it has no intrinsic value beyond the cost of creation and the market's perceived value.
Turn off the servers and there is no value. It's just air. It doesn't even have the backing of a fiat currency.
 
Feels like another South Sea Bubble / Tulip Fever moment. It’s fascinating though. Wish I’d got some of my home computers mining back in 2007 or so!
 
Here's an interesting article on Bitcoin with a simple video crash course. Extremist groups are finding a haven in it.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/...310.php?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

I dabble in Bitcoin ($200) and so far Coinbase is good. It's kind of like casino cash for me.
If you wanted to trade a Bitcoin or 20,000 of them in for cold hard cash right now, cash that you can sit in your living room and count out on you lap, cash made of paper .. in other words: real cash .. is that an easy thing to do or is there a catch ?

.. and if they are so individually valuable, why can I buy a single gold plated one for 99 cents when they're being touted as being worth between $16,000 and $19,000 daily for a single coin ?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/BITCOIN-Go...320547?hash=item239415ee23:g:9ZUAAOSwY6FZ3ZNo

.. and has anyone else noticed that the Emperor's wearing no clothes ? ..
 
Last edited:
.. and if they are so individually valuable, why can I buy a single gold plated one for 99 cents when they're being touted as being worth between $16,000 and $19,000 daily for a single coin ?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/BITCOIN-Go...320547?hash=item239415ee23:g:9ZUAAOSwY6FZ3ZNo

.. and has anyone else noticed that the Emperor's wearing no clothes ? ..
Not that I am a fan of bitcoin, but I would guess the physical coin on ebay doesn't have the unique identifier of an actual coin, it simply looks like the logo.
 
Not that I am a fan of bitcoin, but I would guess the physical coin on ebay doesn't have the unique identifier of an actual coin, it simply looks like the logo.
aah, OK then and thanks .. still doesn't validate the currency if I can't withdraw it and buy stuff with it though .. can you withdraw an buy stuff with it ? ..
 
aah, OK then and thanks .. still doesn't validate the currency if I can't withdraw it and buy stuff with it though .. can you withdraw an buy stuff with it ? ..
The websites that I've seen that "accept bitcoin" hadn't actually accepted bitcoin, they have provided a payment method that let's the buyer convert their bitcoin to dollars/pounds/euros on the spot and them pay with the regular currency. As a result the seller never actually receives bitcoin into their accounts.
 
If you wanted to trade a Bitcoin or 20,000 of them in for cold hard cash right now, cash that you can sit in your living room and count out on you lap, cash made of paper .. in other words: real cash .. is that an easy thing to do or is there a catch ?

You can buy and sell Bitcoins or fractions thereof for cash. I have through Coinbase.

Here's an answer for large amounts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1960578.0

.. and if they are so individually valuable, why can I buy a single gold plated one for 99 cents when they're being touted as being worth between $16,000 and $19,000 daily for a single coin ?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/BITCOIN-Gold-Plated-Physical-Bitcoin-in-protective-acrylic-case-FAST-SHIPPING/152808320547?hash=item239415ee23:g:9ZUAAOSwY6FZ3ZNo

Bitcoin is digital currency, there are no actual coins. That Ebay item has nothing to do with it. It's just a novelty.

.. and has anyone else noticed that the Emperor's wearing no clothes ? ..

Bitcoin has serious attention and has stood the test of time since 2010. More discussion if you are interested in following up.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=1.0

See this video if you just want a simple explanation: https://cheddar.com/videos/if-youre-still-confused-about-bitcoin-check-out-our-crash-course
 
Last edited:
As if 50 Cent didn't have enough money, he accepted bitcoin for album sales back in 2014 and it is now worth millions! Jammy %&#@.

50 Cent has discovered that he is a Bitcoin millionaire, thanks to some long-forgotten album sales.

In 2014, he released the album Animal Ambition and became the first artist to accept Bitcoin as payment.

The rapper received more than 700 Bitcoins under the deal, but then forgot about the cryptocurrency, according to celebrity newsite TMZ.

The hoard is worth $7-$8m, although the currency's price volatility means that could change fast.

In 2014, one Bitcoin was equivalent to about $662, but was worth about $11,200 on Thursday according to Coindesk.
 
As if 50 Cent didn't have enough money, he accepted bitcoin for album sales back in 2014 and it is now worth millions! Jammy %&#@.

He'd better hurry up and sell it. BTC price has been dropping a lot lately (it's about 1/3 of the December peak). Doesn't help when governments announce banning/restricting/taxing BTC and banks refuse to allow payments to exchanges.

Imagine the reactions of the folks who thought it would keep climbing and invested real money.

Personally? I hope it rebounds and peaks again (then it can collapse if it wants). I have about 1/3 of a coin that I mined years ago and it would be nice to get a few quid out of it...
 
It will eventually crash all the way down to the ground. And there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Remember negative equity in the housing market ?

Same idea. people will have bought this false money and will find that they can't get rid of it without losing all the money they paid to acquire it.

A very clever scam. The really clever people got into it and out again months ago. They have real money to show for it.

INT21
 
Back
Top